Today in Texas History: Artist, naturalist Audubon born

On this date in 1785, artist and naturalist John James Audubon was born in Saint Domingue.

Library of Congress archive

John James Audubon

Audubon traveled the Gulf coast of the Republic of Texas in April 1837, observing birds including blue-winged teals and ivory-billed woodpeckers.

He and his son, John, also visited Houston and met with President Sam Houston.

His observations and drawings during the trip would become part of his later works including “The Birds of America.”

According to PBS:

“John James Audubon is best known for “The Birds of America,” a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in the size of life. Its creation cost Audubon eighteen years of monumental effort in finding the birds, making the book, and selling it to subscribers…

“His story is a dramatic and surprising one. Audubon was not born in America, but saw more of the North American continent than virtually anyone alive, and even in his own time he came to exemplify America – the place of wilderness and wild things. The history of his life reveals his era and his nation: he lived in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and New York – traveled everywhere from Labrador to the Dry Tortugas off Florida, from the Republic of Texas to the mouth of the Yellowstone – was a merchant, salesman, teacher, hunter, itinerant portraitist and woodsman, an artist and a scientist. He was, in a sense, a one-man compendium of American culture of his time. And his growing apprehension about the destruction of nature became a prophecy of his nation’s convictions in the century after his death.

“So it is that Audubon has been called (by Lewis Mumford) ‘an archetypal American who astonishingly combined in equal measure the virtues of George Washington, Daniel Boone and Benjamin Franklin’ and ‘the nearest thing American art has had to a founding father.’”